/lit/ - Literature

there is something seriously wrong if an ultimate symbolic act such as suicide is capable of being explained and predicted structurally or as part of the code of significations. where is the authenticity. now you can't even kill yourself without it being adapted and intelligible to the whole

Here is the crucial question however, which everyone is too short-sighted to ask:
"Does quality literariness make the game itself better?"
And the answer is a fervent NO. Just as quality literariness does not make a movie any better or a book (NOT A TEXT) any better. The only thing that quality literariness improves is A TEXT. What makes one movie better than another are the cinematic techniques of that movie, the shots, the camera placement, the mise-en-scene etc etc. What makes a painting better than another is the use of painting techniques. What makes one game better than another is its mechanics.

Now, this does not mean that one video-game cannot have a better literariness to it than another but such an evaluation is TEXTUAL; it has nothing to do with the game. You are essentially asking "is (x) game a better TEXT than (y) game" you are essentially engaging in textual evaluation rather than an evaluation of the mechanics electronic games, and the same applies to movies. Now you could even extend this to books; "is A a better book than B" = are the material conditions that constitute (a) book better than the material conditions that constitute (b) book. See? Nothing to do with the actual text of the book itself, although there is some fine print (the material conditions always influence the text) they are essentially two different kinds of criticism.

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